rain on tulips

Take five kids, one cell phone, and one-ride-limit carte blanche at Disneyland, and you have the independent crew! Let them do it once, and they assume they can take free reign of the park, and not have to do the ‘little kid’ rides. Silly kids!

(More to follow, I’m sure! We’re still in travel recuperation stage!)

I set the alarm last night. I know I did, because I had it set for one time, then remembered that DA had football practice before school, so set it for an earlier time.

I turned it on. I even checked it again at 3:30 when I was up changing a diaper.

We were all set to go.

When JS woke me at ten minutes to eight, then, I was in total shock! My alarm had not gone off!

DA missed the last football practice before his first game tomorrow!

AE and DS missed their first day of early-morning Orchestra class!

DA and JS were late for school!

AE, DS, and GC had missed their school bus!

(Turns out I set the alarm all right… but neglected to make certain it was set for a.m. rather than p.m. sigh)

I was getting on the computer this morning to start writing up the packing list for vacation, and found the list I made last summer when we went to the family reunion! Woohoo! I was able to keep 3/4^ths of it, and just do some tweaking for this trip! Always a good thing if I don’t have to type it all in from scratch again!

Now, if the kids’ rooms were clean enough that I could find all the things I need to pack…. bwahahaha!

Still here! Frantically cleaning and nursing sick kids and healing broken kids and ordering tickets for vacation and cleaning bedrooms and doing laundry and chasing the climbing boy and setting up beds and taking down cribs and washing laundry and attending curriculum nights and football parent nights and doing dishes and vacuuming up fish crackers and icing black eyes and and and…

*Yawn!*

No wonder I’m so tired!

Hoping to type up some packing lists for vacation this evening, and maybe download all the pictures off my camera, as well.

And hoping to get rid of this sinus headache that set in this morning, right in the middle of vacation-countdown-chaos!!

Yesterday:

CC is happy to be the little one at home, I think, and EK started back at her same preschool, different teacher! She loved her first day, and is excited to get back into a regular routine.

GC is thrilled to be in first grade, to get to eat lunch at school, and to be there all day! DS is hitting the big time, getting all the intensive essay instruction that starts in fourth grade.

AE is now ‘top dog’ at her school, heading into sixth grade, and is blossoming into a total social butterfly! JS is really excited to be going into Junior High — “Its so much cooler than elementary school!”

DA has started 8th grade, and has mixed feelings about his classes. But he keeps reminding himself that he wasn’t sure about some of them last year, and most wound up being his favorite! He’s also filling his time with football (way more hours practicing than I like to think about!), and is trying to make the varsity team as a defensive end! Good luck, DA!

And, because no first day of school is ever complete without some sort of bump in the road…Our bump came in the form of a call from the school about 3 hours in that GC had fallen (for a second time that day!) from the monkey bars, and just didn’t seem to be ok. A few quick calls to the pediatrician’s office, a full-then-abandoned grocery cart, and some quick babysitting shuffling later, GC was diagnosed with a broken arm — I think its the end of the ulna, right below the elbow. The pediatrician, when she splinted it, said that unfortunately this type of break often requires surgical correction! *ick!* We ought to find out more tomorrow, when we take her to the Orthopaedic unit at the children’s hospital. Today, she’s home watching movies, not moving around a lot, and debating which color cast to request when we finally get to see the specialists.

GC lost her first tooth tonight! Its been loose for ages, and it finally took an apple to set it free this evening!

Tomorrow is the first day of school. For six out of seven kids.

I’m still in total denial mode!

We’ve got a few kids’ supplies to pack up. A few schedules to still coordinate. No kids on any sort of sleep schedule conducive to getting up and going for school.

I am so not ready! (When did summers start flying by so fast???)